Studiospazio: Workshop Garage in a Garden, Suzzara, Italy

The garden workshop and garage in Suzzara, designed by a young Italian office called Studiospazio, fills us with the feelings of relief and optimism: architecture is still capable of looking beyond the horizon of the possible – and in a place where we least expect it.

Photo credits: Stefano Graziani

There is nothing in the park, with dense trees surrounding a semi-detached house in an anonymous, almost rural suburban area of Suzzara in Lombardy, to make it stand out. Its suburban ordinariness and self-sufficiency render its normality almost uncanny. It could easily feature in the introductory scene of Blue Velvet, the film by David Lynch, where a deep insight into the tranquillity of residential suburbia reveals the psychology of the American dream. If with Lynch this insight leaves the audience shattered, the view into the greenery of suburban Suzzara reveals the power of the poetics of the ordinary. Among those high trees, a thin gabled roof is levitating in the air. The building hosts two parking lots, and a workshop with a closed tool shed in the central part, and is therefore the essence of suburban everyday reality: a car makes it possible to reach the urban centre, and it is thus connected to cosmopolitanism, while the garden tool shed and the workshop enable access to the pristine natural environment of the garden and manual work stemming from it, which contributes to our lives some of that original raw humanity. Despite its rather banal suburban ordinariness – or perhaps because of it – the garden garage and workshop in Suzzara can be described as the essence of architecture, a pure, primal archetypal concept.

Photo credits: Stefano Graziani

The complete article is published in Autumn 2019 issue of Piranesi No. 41 Vol. 27.